Web Design and SEO
Designing a website is more than just making sure the site is attractive and includes all the information you want to convey to visitors. If the site is designed with SEO built in, it saves time and money in the long run, having to go back and add in the elements necessary for the best optimization.
We’ve gathered some related data from trusted sources that define why SEO is so important in your website design and ways to make sure it’s optimized to be most effective.
Wondering How to Make Your Web Design and SEO Work Together?
Combining website design with SEO baked in can sometimes be a tricky process because the designers and developers often have a very different focus than the SEO experts. You need someone who can drive the effort with the goal of producing a great website that drives traffic and conversions and gets found and ranked highly by the search engines. The website must also be mobile-optimized for better rankings.
Top 5 Ways Responsive Web Design Benefits Your SEO
If you haven’t done so already, this article outlines the following reasons you should upgrade your website to a mobile-responsive design.
- A positive user experience is paramount to achieve good reviews, more traffic and lead conversions. Responsive web design improves usability, which also is favored by search engines.
- Faster Page Speed. Websites that are mobile responsive will ordinarily load faster, resulting in a better user experience and higher rankings.
- Decreased Bounce Rate. Because the user experience is enhanced, the time they spend on the website will be longer.
- Less Duplicate Content. A single responsive website will be designed for all devices. Creating separate sites for mobile users risks creating duplicate content; a negative factor with Google ranking algorithms.
- Boosted Social Sharing. Mobile-responsive websites encourage and facilitate social sharing.
Universal Web Design Principles That Improve Usability and Conversion
Neil Patel provides recommendations on how to make your web design more than just a collection of pretty pictures. A good design needs to get visitors to respond to calls to action. The visual hierarchy of your web pages should be such that visitors can detect the important pieces without having to read all the information on the page. You can accomplish this through the page scanning pattern, making the most important element stand out by making it larger or brighter in color, making the text bolder, adding headings and sub-headings and overall layout characteristics.
Improve SEO with Inspirational Web Design in 2017
This article discusses Google’s “RankBrain” algorithm and how it is impacting SEO rankings. RankBrain is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can be used to hone in on keywords from questions or longer search queries. It actually can “understand” and answer questions pretty accurately.
The key takeaway from this post is that, even though keywords and backlinks are still important in achieving optimal SEO, inspirational graphics web design is also very helpful in attracting visitors and converting them into leads. The need for inspiring design will only be growing in the future, due to the AI available and being developed.
10 Dangerous Web Design Mistakes That Destroy SEO
Outlining areas where you need to concentrate on NOT doing in your website design, the article expands on the following aspects. If you focus on making them all “DO’s” rather than “DON’Ts”, you will build a website from the ground up with SEO included.
- Failing to set quantifiable goals and measure your results
- Not thoroughly testing all design elements
- Not prioritizing page speed
- Improperly sized/unoptimized media
- Not prioritizing responsive design
- Changes in URL structure
- Ignoring website security
- Failing to test mission-critical elements
- Making excessive http requests
- Skipping the final launch checklist
St. Louis SEO for Growth Builds Websites with SEO Baked In!
If you are looking to get a website that is appealing, drives traffic and generates leads, we are your solution! We start the process with keyword research so that local SEO is built into the design, not added as an afterthought.